Soledad O'Brien
speaker
904 appearances
45 recordings
7 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 28 Feb
Soledad O'Brien’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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With so much of the public's eye on this case, I can't even imagine the pressure the jurors faced. After more than seven hours, the foreman told Judge Corcoran they were at a standstill.
It was already 10.30 at night. He told the jury to go home. They'd continue their deliberations in the morning. The next day, the jury resumed. In a way, they also retraced Mary's steps. Though they couldn't go to the towpath, they used photographs and maps to pore over the evidence. trying to put the pieces together on how Mary was killed and who might have done it.
After 11 hours of back and forth over two days, they reached a decision. Everyone returned to the courtroom. The trial had lasted 11 days, and now there was a conclusion. Ray's mother, Martha, had been at the trial every day, but she couldn't be there for the actual announcement. It was too much for her. So she waited in the courthouse corridor.
Ray sat motionless throughout the trial, but now, standing, waiting for his verdict, he was swaying. Judge Corcoran commended the prosecution and defense for presenting both sides of the case. Then the foreman offered the written verdict to the judge. Corcoran told the jury to rise.
He said, Members of the jury, we have your verdict, which states that you find the defendant, Ray Crump Jr., not guilty. And this is your verdict, so say you each and all. The jurors nodded. Corcoran told Crump, you are a free man. Ray's eyes were closed. It almost looked like he was fainting. Then he and Dovey hugged. Here was a man who'd been in jail for nearly a year.
He was in solitary confinement. He could have faced the death penalty if found guilty. And now he could finally go home. In the corridor, Ray's mother, Martha, held back tears. She and her friends praised the Lord, singing hallelujah through the courtroom. She thanked the Lord for returning her son back to her.
The jury didn't believe Ray was Mary's killer. And Dovey helped everyone see it. And managed to present her entire defense in 20 minutes, no less. That's right, her entire defense was that quick because of her strategic decision not to put Ray on the stand. On July 31st, 1965, the New York Times reported the verdict. The headline read, Washington Negro Freed in Murder.
If that's not a sign of the times, I don't know what is. That in itself proves how historic this win was. Here was a black woman who could barely walk around Georgetown without people raising their eyebrows because of her race. And yet, she had just won a case against a powerful white prosecutor who had the state and all of its resources behind him. Here's Bob Bennett again.
Soon, judges began appointing her murder cases left and right.
At last, the legal community gave her respect. Letters came in from all over the country congratulating Dovey on her big courtroom success. A friend from St. Louis wrote her a note shortly after the verdict. He said...
But not everyone was happy with the verdict. People like Bob Bennett.
Other people did feel that way, like Mary's family and friends. Cicely Angleton sat in the back of the courtroom when she heard the news. She was stoic. And several days after the trial, Ben Bradley called Hantman, asking him, what went wrong? Why did Ray get off? We couldn't find any records of Mary's ex-husband, Cord, or their sons being at the trial.
A few sources told us Mary's family thought the prosecution was going after the right man all along. Maybe when the judge granted Ray's freedom, they felt like they were watching the murderer slip through their hands. It had to be devastating. We reached out to the Meyer family. A producer of ours spoke with one of Mary's sons on the phone, but he and the family declined to speak for this podcast.
What if, in their eyes, the man who killed their beloved Mary went unpunished and now he was going home?
Even if Mary's family thought it was unfair, Ray was now a free man, he had still been punished. He was locked up for nearly a year, and we know that at least some of it was in solitary confinement. His life would never be the same. He was irrevocably changed by being locked away.
That's Terry Coopers. He studies prison conditions, including solitary confinement. He's a psychiatrist at the Wright Institute.
This could be what happened to Ray. The trauma of jail time hardened him. After the trial, he was a free man, but no longer the man he had been. Shortly after returning home, Ray and his wife, Helena, split up for good. She hadn't visited him in jail. At first, Ray returned to his routine. He went back to his construction jobs. He worked to lay the foundations for D.C.
buildings that lawyers and journalists work in to this day. But four years after his acquittal, his life would never be the same. Ray was never a criminal before being locked up. But after, something changed. After he was acquitted for Mary Myers' death, he was arrested 22 times. Some were petty crimes, but others were very serious. In 1971, he remarried.
He and his new wife moved in together with her four children in Maryland. We don't know much about their family life, but things got bad enough that at one point, Ray turned on his wife.
He was arrested again. He pled guilty to malicious burning and went to jail for two months, followed by rehab for alcohol. He threatened other women in his life and was arrested multiple times for vandalism and arson, setting fire to homes and cars. For many people, these crimes were a sign that Ray had killed Mary, but just gotten away with it. Here's Ron Rosenbaum.
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